Imagine if you had a photo of the factory worker who put your iPOD/Phone/TV/Shoe/Pen/T-Shirt/Chair/Computer together.

We’re putting together a marketing plan and digital strategies outline for a children’s television series which is in development for an Australian network. It has been sold around the world and the producers are pretty excited about the social networking opportunities. Forums, blogs, ‘Second Life’ Islands and behind-the-scenes access areas are nothing new, but this series comes at a time when 90% of nine-year-olds have used the Internet and 34% of twelve year-olds have a profile on a social networking site. Never before have young teenagers engaged so enthusiastically with online content or been more inclined to join online communities.

I can’t reveal too much about the series, given that it’s in production and all a bit hush-hush, but it’s along the same lines as something like The Saddle Club or Bluewater High — a bunch of kids who are elite proponents of a particularly popular activity who are growing up together and attending the same school. The websites for those shows are pretty good, I particularly like Bluewater High’s, but the strategy we’re putting together is going to be on a whole new level.

The online strategy for the show is divided into four basic parts:

• A website which invites fans into a virtual world, allowing them to interact with the characters and their unique environment and chat with other fans.
• A behind-the-scenes website which acts like an online (extended) version of the special features on a DVD that shows interviews, allows fans to ask questions and even allows people to audition for the show.
• An online store which sells related merchandise.
• Discussion forums where fans can post messages and respond to related topics about the show and the popular activity the show deals with.

Here’s some of the cool things we’re doing on the social networking side:

A ‘Virtual World’ Website with Characters Integrating with Facebook and MySpace

Using Flash™ technology a detailed virtual world will be created where fans can walk through the sets and see where the characters have been. Bandwidth issues in Australia prevent video-intensive features like real-time character interaction (like you might find in a video game), but it’s certainly possible to create a static virtual world. Powderfinger’s Hotel Existence website is along the lines of what we’re talking about.

Fans will be able to sneak into character’s bedrooms and read their diaries, see what they’re listening to on their iPODs, see what they ate for lunch and gather clues from the virtual set to use in online games and competitions.

The coolest feature of this virtual world though, is how the character’s profiles will integrate with actual Facebook and MySpace profiles. The producers were keen to create a new stand-alone social networking platform especially for the show, using something like Ning, but we explained to them that if we used existing platforms, fans will already be familiar with the user-interface, they won’t have to sign-up for anything new and most importantly, every single aspect of their interaction with the show’s characters will be automatically broadcast to all their other friends who share the same social networking platform. The average Facebook user has more than 150 friends, so by allowing fans to interact with characters on Facebook you are increasing the show’s marketing reach by a factor of 150 for every single fan.

The social networking profiles will be updated weekly by production staff, in sync with the onscreen events. So, for example, when two characters start dating, their Facebook profiles will change to show that they are ‘In a Relationship’. When they break up, their profile will be updated accordingly. These changes will obvioiusly also appear in their real-life ‘friends’ news feeds as if the events were happening to real people. When characters post on other characters’ walls, fans will be able to track the conversations between them.

The characters will also post event invitations. For example, in the lead-up to an episode where one character throws herself a sixteenth birthday party, all her real Facebook friends will be invited to attend. Candid photographs of the party will later appear and fans will be able to comment on the photographs.

YouTube Integration

Several instructional videos will be created by real-life, professional proponents of the activity the show centres around (imagine if Kelly Slater had put together a series of instructional surfing videos for Bluewater High and then they were posted all over YouTube). A section of the website will be devoted to showcasing these videos and via step-by-step tutorials, fans will be able to learn what the characters are doing. Fans will then be able to film themselves and their friends and upload them to the site and to YouTube. This will ensure the website gains significant exposure in YouTube (and Google) when people from around the world are searching for videos of this activity – increasing the reach of the online campaign far beyond the core Australian audience.

Montages of popular television shows created by fans who put their favourite scenes together in a YouTube re-mix are another recent video Phenomenon (one fan film clip from Australian children’s series H20: Just Add Water has had more than 650,000 YouTube views). It’s a labour of love that can take countless hours, but tools like Flektor are making it easier to do and by providing fans with a library of useful clips, helpfully sorted under appropriate categories, we’ll make the process super-easy and encourage fans to plaster as many clips as they like on YouTube.

Fans will also be able to download songs from the website soundtrack and edit them into the clips, resulting in huge exposure for the artists (a bargaining chip when licensing the songs). The website will then run competitions and the fans can vote on their favourite montages, bringing new filmmakers to the fore and increasing exposure on YouTube to a worldwide audience.

Fan Fiction

Creative, dedicated fans love writing fictional stories about their characters. Sites like Fan Fiction.net have millions of stories uploaded about virtually every popular television series ever created. Buffy the Vampire Slayer alone has more than 30,000 stories uploaded by fans.

A section of the website will actively encourage fan fiction competitions where people write stories about the characters and upload them for others to read. Producers will actively use this as a research tool to figure out what fans want to happen in the next series.

Those are just some of the strategies I can talk about publicly. We’re pretty excited about it all and I’d love to hear any feedback you had on what we’re doing. If anyone has any brilliant ideas of their own I’m all ears…

I’ve blogged about Facebook a little bit, but if you’re looking for a neat overview of the social networking platform from a marketing perspective check out this new e-Book from American analyst Matt Dickman.

It covers the following topics and it’s pretty easy to digest:

• What does the global population look like on Facebook?
• What is the age/gender breakdown of the Facebook population?
• How many members are over the age of 25/30/40?
• What options can I use to reach my audience?
• How much is it going to cost to reach them?

The last couple of topics are particularly relevant if you want to understand how the Facebook advertising system works. The first few go into detail about Australia as well - we’re one of the biggest Facebook users in the world.

If you’re keen to get a bit more involved and want to start creating Facebook applications (although it seems people are pretty much over them, myself included), check out this post by Jonathan which gives a run-down of the basics. Anyone considering Facebook should also read David Gillespie’s post: Facebook: Advertising Heaven or Hell?

It’s a capitalist tool, but even after the revolution, in the darkest days of red army rule and state-induced famine, the Bolsheviks had it. Imagine a world without advertising. Imagine if no organisations exchanged currency for promotion: No billboards, no radio spots, no TV commercials, no banner ads, no AdSense. No editorials, no splash pages, no magazine back-covers, no inside covers, no infomercials. Imagine if no one saw or heard ads anymore.

Imagine if the only way you would make a purchasing decision was because of the advice of other people you trusted.

That’s where we’re heading.

We’ve just launched a new website for a Brisbane company called Big Cat Reality. They operate a huge catamaran that takes scuba divers on weekend trips in the Moreton Bay Marine Park and up to the Great Barrier Reef. The crew are experienced and hilarious, the scenery is amazing and it’s one of the best-value scuba diving trips in the country. I’m really proud of the site because it’s a great example of how you can use social media marketing to great effect in a small business. Social media marketing really doesn’t work well for a lot of companies because most people don’t give a shit about them. You don’t need to know what your local baker is doing when you’re not buying a pie and you don’t want to share photos with your plumber. Big Cat Reality on the other hand was just screaming out for a social media marketing campaign and it’s really working well for them.

Here’s what we’re doing and why it’s working…

Facebook

Scuba Divers all own cameras and they all take photos. Hundreds of them. Under the water, above the water, on the boat, when they get off the boat, when they’re eating, when the crew do something funny, when the captain wears a silly hat, when someone has a few too many post-dive-brewskies. They go away for a weekend with a couple of dozen like-minded individuals, become best friends, and every moment is documented. Naturally they like to share their memories and they want to keep in touch with their new friends because divers always need dive buddies. Big Cat Reality clients are a pre-packaged social network just screaming out for a place to converge. We could have started a customised Big Cat community using an application like Ning, but in reality, Facebook does everything they need and their demographic (25-35s) is savvy enough to know what Facebook is, but probably not keen enough to try something new. Facebook fits their business better than a new 2mm wetsuit; the customers love it, it’s easy for crew to update: win-win.

YouTube

Scuba Divers get to live in a completely different world to the rest of us. They’re keen to show others what it’s like and there are heaps of talented underwater cinematographers out there who are more than happy to splice their footage together and give it away. In fact, Big Cat Reality had already been tagged in half a dozen brilliant YouTube vidoes without them even knowing about it (proof that the best marketing strategy in the world is producing a great product that influential people want to share with their friends). It didn’t take much to create an official Big Cat Reality YouTube channel and start collating the videos together. It’s early days yet, but we’ll work with them to make sure they come up in YouTube and Google when people search for all the dive locations they visit (and for keywords like ’scuba diving’ in general).

Viral

It took them a few years to figure out why it was a good idea, but the crew have started gathering email addresses of clients who are keen to know more about upcoming trips. They have such a great product and what they offer is such a good deal (and an amazing experience) that people are more than happy to give their details over: in fact, they’d be disappointed if they weren’t kept informed about what was happening. A good viral marketing campaign isn’t about having the funniest photo, it’s about finding people who want to forward your message on because they believe in it. We’re working with Big Cat Reality to make sure they have the kind of email alerts and newsletters that people want to forward to their friends. It’s an easy job too, because if you go away on an amazing dive trip and someone makes it easy for you to share the photos, videos and stories of that experience with people who are interested in what you got up to on your weekend, it pretty much takes care of itself.

Summary

Social media marketing doesn’t work for everyone. People won’t build social networks around cola or freeze-dried noodles, but if your product appeals to an existing community of like-minded individuals who have stories and images to share, social media marketing is your most powerful tool. It doesn’t take much effort, the market does the work for you, and it’s dirt-cheap. If you have a great product people will tell their friends about you anyway, all you have to do is make it easy for them.

Here are the basic guidelines for getting your site to rank well in Google. Consider it SEO 101 — the most important things you need to know. Once you’ve mastered SEO 101 you’ll be well on your way.

1. Read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and if you don’t understand something, ask a question in the Google Webmaster Help Forum.
2. Make your website the best site there is on whatever it is you’re talking about. If you want to be #1 in Google you need to deserve to be #1. Think of information you could put on your site that would make other people want to tell their friends about without you having to ask them and put that information on your site. For example, write a blog which discusses industry news, allow people to upload photos to your site, start a forum where people can talk about your service or product, or put together a collection of amusing YouTube videos which are related to your industry. Think about it this way, if your site has the same information as every other site, why should you rank above them?
3. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to get an overview of what words and phrases people are using to find your products or services.
4. Choose the two keywords you think will work best for you and then edit the homepage of your site so it is clear to Google that your website is closely related to those words by doing the following:
   1. Change the page title so that the important keywords are in it.
   2. Write a meta description that uses the keywords and, more importantly, is a sales pitch for your business. Google uses the meta description you write as a summary of your site in its results.
   3. Make sure the main heading on the page is in a <h1> tag and make sure it has the keywords in it.
   4. Use the keywords in the text on the page.
   5. If there is no text on the page, add some, but make it visible to anyone who sees the site.
5. Make sure every other page has relevant keywords in the title, meta description, headings and content.
6. Make sure you have a text link to each page in the site.
7. Find online directories which list businesses in your geographical area and directories which list businesses in your industry and submit your site to them.
8. Ask business partners and friends which have websites that are similar to yours to link to you and offer to link back to them in return.
9. Create a Google Webmaster Tools account so you can let Google communicate with you and see what Google thinks of your site.
10. Write down a list of website URLs that are competing with you and then search for them in Yahoo’s site explorer tool and check the ‘inlinks’ to see who is linking to them. Write a personal note to those people and ask them to link to you. If you think your visitors would be interested in the sites, offer to link to them as well.
11. Don’t try and ‘out-smart’ Google. Any trick you can think of has been done before and you’ll end up getting your site black-listed.

There are plenty of other things you can do, but if you cover these SEO 101 basics your site is pretty much guaranted to rank well.

Two digital music stations and the viral power of blogs.

David Gillespie told me how stupid and crap Stripe is. It is. It’s crap and it won’t work and it’s stupid. I’m telling you now.

Iain Tait told me how f**king good Blip.fm is. It is. It’s brilliant and I’m listening to it now and I’m going to keep listening to it. And now I’m telling you. Go and listen. It’s f**king brilliant.

This is how blogs work. This is what they do. People whispering across the world.

I wrote yesterday about how smart corporations should be engaging bloggers in dialogue. Not just idly watching with Google alerts, but actively reaching out and befriending those who are talking about their products and services. They know that bloggers are as powerful, if not more so, than the radio shock jocks of yesteryear. Adding mildy relevant comments only when it suits just isn’t good enough, if you want people to blog about your product you need to have started cultivating relationships well before your latest campaign rolls out. It’s public relations 101 (well, public relations 2.0 perhaps).

No matter how small, or seemingly unpopular you think a blog is, I can guarantee you that more than one person is reading it. If that blogger mentions your product favourably to one person who is actively listening it’s worth more than 100 random poster impressions from people waiting for the bus. In fact, if you’re a disgruntled customer, one little blog post could be enough to make you switch banks.

Case in point: yesterday one of the other partners here at e-CBD read my blog post about NAB’s new electronic statement facility. She was helping her father-in-law with his tax and his bank didn’t provide more than three months worth of statements online. He’d lost a bunch of the paper versions and didn’t keep his receipts, so it was causing her all sorts of grief. She didn’t even know that banks were providing this new service for free and while it was a bit too much hassle to try and make her father in-law switch banks (he’s 80-years-old and he would rather change his left nostril than go through the paperwork of changing banks), if it had been her, she would have seriously considered becoming a NAB customer on the spot. And that’s just one person. If anyone else had been hit with some hefty random account-keeping fee by their bank, or had to wait too long in line at their local branch, or been given the run-around by a ‘customer service’ phone system, or been denied a credit card and then read that blog post, it could well have been enough to tip them over the edge too.

Don’t underestimate the power of one little blog post. Every time a blogger hits publish it creates another piece of the long tail that will more than likely live forever.

NAB (the National Australia Bank) made a profit of more than $4 billion last year, so they’ve been spending some of their cash experimenting with blogs. They know that blogs are important social media outlets and that the powerful ones have as much (if not more) influence and audience reach as traditional media. They are the modern equivalent of the newspaper opinion column (except they’re widely read). They know that if you can get people to blog about your product it’s a really cheap and effective form of promotion. NAB has been trying to figure out how to use blogs as a marketing tool.

Bludgeoning their way through the back door and spamming unsuspecting football forums with promotional messages backfired on them fantastically and earned the bank the wrath of the very people they were trying to get on side. They were hardly apologetic, but at least they admitted in an interview that they’d learned some lessons. Social networking blogger Julian Cole showed them that simply turning up, uninvited, on someone’s doorstep is not an effective way of getting your message across.

So, if espionage is out, how then, exactly, DO you get people to blog about your product? Actually, you might be surprised to learn that it’s relatively simple. In fact, I’m about to do it now.

I’m a NAB customer. I was preparing my tax return last night the way I usually do, that is, by going through piles of paper and manually entering data into a spreadsheet. It’s time-consuming and annoying. I had all my bank and credit card statements in front of me (the ones I had remembered to keep at least) and Excel fired up on the screen. It was taking ages. I remembered that last year I had tried to export data from NAB’s online banking system but it would only let me spit out the last couple of months worth of transactions, which wasn’t particularly handy. I went back in to have a poke around and saw a link that said ‘View Statements’. It turns out that there’s now an option to sign up for electronic statements, which means I can see the last seven years worth of transactions online and they won’t send me paper letters anymore. This was going to save me hours and hours of work, not to mention a couple of trees: brilliant! But why hadn’t they told me about this? They knew it was tax time and that people would find that feature useful, couldn’t they have popped a little message up in their system with a little tip saying something along the lines of “Access your statements online at the click of a button’. Click here to find out how.”

Well, *cough*, oops, it turns out that’s exactly what they’d been doing. I just hadn’t been paying attention. Right there, before my eyes, above my account balance in the online banking system was an inoffensive, appropriately-placed, subtle and concise message saying exactly that.

Why hadn’t I seen it?

Because it looked like an ad.

Research shows that people ignore online banner ads.

Whilst that’s still relevant and interesting, it’s a whole other point to the one I’m making. What I’m getting at is that I was so overjoyed with NAB’s efforts to help me view my statements and generally make my life easier, my first reaction was ‘I’m going to blog about that’. If NAB spent more time making my life easier, and found more effective ways of telling me about it, I’d be happy to broadcast their brilliance here at Zakazukha Zoo.

If they were really smart, they’d be paying attention to people who are blogging about them and they’d dive right in and start a direct dialogue. Just like The Body Shop and Vodafone UK are doing (read the comments sections of those blogs). Smart corporations have PR people who know the importance of cultivating relationships with journalists, if they want to get the blogosphere on side, smart corporations should spend more time on the right side of the coal face. We know you’re listening NAB. Come and join us…

An article in the Business section of today’s Australian newspaper has revealed than according to the latest figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau, Australians now spend more time online than they do watching television. The average time spent online is now 13.7 hours per week, compared to 13.3 watching TV.

The combined online advertising spend over the last 12 months exceeded 1.5 billion for the first time.

Does your business’s advertising spend reflect those figures?